Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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JANUARY 4-10, 2016 UCW 17 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM When the actions of a mentally challenged teenaged boy begin to frighten other children and alarm their parents, what should be done? By the boy's family? By the state? Is it time to institutionalize the boy? Are there medical procedures that can eliminate his offensive and dangerous conduct? These questions and these situations can tear families and communities apart. Award-winning poet and novelist Elizabeth Cox, formerly at Duke and more recently at Wofford College, deals with such challenges in her latest novel, A Question of Mercy. Set in the North Carolina of the early 1950s, we learn the family's side of this situation through the voice of Jess Booker, the teenaged stepsister of Adam, who suffers from a disabling mental condition. Jess's mother is dead. When her widowed father married Adam's mother, Jess became Adam's unwilling and uncomfortable caregiver. As the relationship develops, she warms to Adam and becomes his advocate, arguing against her stepmother's determination to institutionalize him. Both Jess and the stepmother know that the likely outcome for Adam in a state institution will be radical medical treatments including lobotomy and sterilization. Jess believes such treatments will destroy the Adam who has become important to her. As Adam comes to understand what is in store for him in a state institution, he becomes desperately sad. After a walk together along the French Broad River, Adam disappears and Jess runs away. When Adam's body is found downriver, the absent Jess becomes a murder suspect, and the novel's story becomes, in part, a murder mystery. But it also becomes several other stories. Jess's adventures as she makes her way from western North Carolina to a small town in Alabama could be a separate novel. On a months-long journey, she is a girl on the run, walking and hitchhiking along the French Broad and through forests and back roads of North Carolina and Georgia to Alabama. Hungry, dirty, wet, and tired, she steals food and clothes, sleeps on the ground and in barns, and resists threatened sexual assaults, all the while trailed by a mysterious man who drives a car with a mangled "I like Ike" bumper sticker that reads "ike Ike." Jess's destination is Lula, Alabama. A man who was a dear friend of Jess's dead mother lives in a boarding house there. As Jess settles in to a warm welcome from her mother's friend and the other residents of the boarding house, another story begins. I should say other stories. After Jess moves in, the residents interact as if they were a part of a television series. There are wonderful characters: Jess's mother's friend, the boarding house owner, a retired professor, a struggling newspaperman, a beloved cook, and two little boys whose father has disappeared. The characters' minor squabbles and romances show Jess their humanity, which shows again when all the adults bond together to keep Social Services from sending the little boys to an orphanage in Birmingham. A brief romance between Jess and the newspaperman is a guide to yet another story. Before Jess ran away from North Carolina, she had fallen in love with a fireman, Sam, who then was called to fight in Korea. Sam is Jess's first love. She treasures his letters and reads them over and over, even while on the run to Alabama. How will the brief fling with the newspaperman affect the romance with Sam? What impact will the terror of war have on Sam and Jess? The poignant answers to these questions bring a climax to this story. How all these stories blend with Adam's tragedy to make a novel, and how the murder mystery is solved are questions that can only be answered by reading the book. Thanks to Cox's lovely writing, that task was for me a very pleasant one. JOHN HOOD, President of the John Locke Foundation. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. D.G. MARTIN, Host of UNC's Book Watch. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly. com. 910.484.6200 Facing Lobotomy and Other Stories by D.G. MARTIN If I could predict the onset of America's next recession with precision, I wouldn't tell you about it. I'd become a money manager and make a pile by timing the market. But I can't, so I won't. Instead, I'll simply observe that based on historical precedent, another recession will come, sooner rather than later. Although the economic recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by historical standards, it has been lengthy. Prudent policymakers need to start thinking about what will happen if the economy takes a dip. Fewer people will be working. The ones who retain their jobs will have less income to spend. Demand will surge for government services that are strongly countercyclical, such as public assistance. At the state level, that typically means a big jump in Medicaid enrollment and expenditure. Weaker revenue collections from income and sales tax coupled with higher expenditures for public assistance can produce sizable budget deficits even if a recession is relatively mild. In North Carolina, the deficit would be at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars and probably more than a billion. Should governments finance such recessionary deficits with borrowing or savings, or close them with a mix of tax hikes and budget cuts? For most states and localities, the first option is off the table. They are required by law to balance their operating budgets without issuing debt. Thanks to prudent decisions by the General Assembly and outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory, North Carolina's savings reserves are healthy. Even after withdrawals to help pay for disaster relief, the rainy-day fund and Medicaid reserves will total nearly $2 billion. Nevertheless, state lawmakers and incoming Gov. Roy Cooper are unlikely to cover a future recessionary deficit entirely with savings. That would leave the state too exposed if it endures a longer-than-expected recession, or sustains other financial hits from weather events or lawsuits. So that leaves the question of whether to tax more, spend less, or some combination to close the remaining budget gap. I think the evidence points strongly in favor of spending less. We've seen in North Carolina how "temporary" tax hikes during deficit years tend to last into periods of economic recovery, acting as a drag on that recovery. We've also seen lawmakers and governors make politically difficult budget decisions during recessions — such as merging agencies or eliminating outdated programs — that have proven to be in the long-term interest of taxpayers. There is emerging empirical evidence in favor of governments closing their budget gaps with spending restraint rather than tax increases. For example, a new study by economists from Harvard University, New York University, and Italy's Bocconi University studied fiscal adjustments in 16 countries over the period from 1981 to 2014. They found that the composition made a big difference in the economic effect. "Adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly than those based upon tax increases regardless of whether they start in a recession or not," the scholars concluded. To say that North Carolina's state and local leaders should respond to future budget gaps with spending restraint is not to say they ought to slash all programs and agencies by equivalent amounts. They should pick and choose. Core services such as public safety deserve the highest priority. Others should get cut not by five percent or 10 percent but by 100 percent. No matter how well-governed a state or locality is, a national recession is likely to throw its operating budget out of balance. The best way to head off an economically damaging tax increase while protecting core services is to keep overall spending growth modest during good economic times, rather than yielding to the temptation to plow the revenue growth into new programs. Such a policy reduces the size of the subsequent budget deficit while building up a substantial savings reserve. Fortunately, this is exactly the policy state government and many local governments in North Carolina have been adhering to since 2010. In the not-too- distant future, we'll be glad they did. Respond Wisely to Next Recession by JOHN HOOD Is N.C. ready for the next recession?